Wednesday, May 29, 2013

How's that sexual revolution working out for you? If you’re
married, the answer is: probably not very well.

There's nothing new about married couples losing interest in sex. There’s
a reason why adultery and the sex business have been around so long.

Couples that were lusting after each other in the early stages
of their marriages find, after a few years of conjugal bliss, that their desire
has died down or even faded away.

Most people are more open and honest about our sexuality, have
learned to explore our sexuality, have fallen in love with “the one,” only to
find out, when they get married, that their sex lives suffer marital bed death.

Daniel Bergner has written a book about the problem.
Previewing it in the New York Times
he began with the statistics:

Lack of
lust, when it creates emotional distress, meets the psychiatric profession’s
clinical criteria for H.S.D.D., or hypoactive sexual-desire disorder.
Researchers have set its prevalence among women between the ages of about 20
and 60 at between 10 and 15 percent. When you count the women who don’t quite
meet the elaborate clinical threshold, the rate rises to around 30 percent. For
a minor fraction of all the sexually indifferent (or repelled), the condition
has been lifelong, regardless of whom they’re with or how long they’ve been
with them. For middle-aged or older women, menopause and its aftermath may play
a role, though its importance is much debated. For a sizable segment of the
undesiring, the most common antidepressants, the selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors, can be the culprit. Millions of American women are on S.S.R.I.'s,
and many of them would have good use for a pill to revive the libido that has
been chemically dulled as a side effect of the pill they take to buoy their
mood.

Surely, it is fair to say that the problem has multiple
causes. Prozac might be one culprit, but as Susan Walsh reminds us on Hooking
Up Smart, depression can also diminish desire and appetite.

Today, more and more women are looking to solve the problem
with chemistry. They are signing up for a clinical trial of a new drug called
Lybrido. Anecdotal accounts of the trials suggest that it produces both good
and bad results. It enhances desire but it keeps enhancing desire even when the
woman does not want it to be enhanced.

Bergner outlines the problems that arise when the problem is
treated chemically:

Chemically
enhancing a woman’s desire might play out in all kinds of ways within a
relationship. Some couples might feel closer, others might feel desolate
because, despite more sex, their bond isn’t stronger. Wives might yearn for the
old seductive efforts of their husbands, even if those gestures stopped working
long ago. Women might feel yet more pressure to perform: Why not get that
prescription? their partners might ask; why not take that pill? And men, if
they are willing to confront the truth, might not be so happy about the
reminder, as their partners reach for the pill bottle, that their women need
chemical assistance to want them. All the agonies that have existed since the
dawn of monogamy will still pertain, many of them coming down to the craving to
feel special.

Among moderns, I venture that gender confusion also plays a
role. With more and more women being breadwinners, it is worth recalling that
men in female breadwinner marriages take more Viagra than do men in traditional
marriages. Women in atypical marriages take more anti-anxiety and anti-insomnia
medication.

How many women lose their sexual desire because they have
discarded their femininity? How many of them insist that their men cease acting
like men and get in touch with their feminine side? What happens to a woman’s
sexual desire when she decides to discard her feminine mystique?

Others have suggested that desire diminishes in marriage because sex is prescribed not proscribed. Presumably, we want what is tabooed more than we want what is available.

Evolutionary psychologists blame it on the simple fact that,
when it comes to sex, men and women are differently constituted. Women
associate sex with reproduction and with risk far more than men do:

But for
many women, the cause of their sexual malaise appears to be monogamy itself. It
is women much more than men who have H.S.D.D., who don’t feel heat for their steady
partners. Evolutionary psychologists argue that this comes down to innate
biology, that men are just made with stronger sex drives — so men will settle
for the woman who’s always near.

Bergner and other counterculture types dismiss these views,
but one suspects that they prefer ideology to science.

Still, it is fair to ask whether women who have lost
interest in sex believe that their husbands want sex more than they want sex
with them. If a man is seeking to have sex with the nearest warm female
body, after a time his wife is going to turn off to sexual encounters because she feels unloved.

Others explain marital bed death by noting that familiarity
breeds disinterest. Being strange and new is apparently more attractive than
being the same and familiar. Apparently, this is true for women more than men:

But for
women who’ve been with their partners between one and four years, a dive begins
— and continues, leaving male desire far higher. (Within this plunge, there is
a notable pattern: over time, women who don’t live with their partners retain
their desire much more than women who do.)

And then there is the daily domestic grind:

Every
woman raised a mix of possible reasons. There were the demands of graduate
school, the demands of children, the demands of work, medical issues, men who
weren’t always as kind or nearly as engaged as they could be. But at bottom
there seemed to be one common cause: they had all grown tired of sex with their
long-term partners.

To be more accurate: in his last sentence Bergner has confused an effect with a cause.

Of course, these are only a few suggestions. We might also
want to ask ourselves how well these couples know how to conduct themselves in
their marriages. Do they try to establish domestic harmony with cooperation and
a clear division of domestic labor? Do they make all household decisions into
drama and conflict? Do they like to fight because they like the make-up sex,
only to find that their fight-fetish is no longer working as well as it did?

And then, it might be a good idea to compare marriages that
have gone cold with marriages where sexual desire is sustained. Rather than
make it seem inevitable that things go wrong, why not examine those couples
where things have gone right?

As scary as the statistics are a majority of couples seem
not to be suffering marital bed death.

We would like to know how these couples conduct themselves
in their marriages. Are they more traditional or more modern?

5 comments:

Traditional = bad. New = good. We live in an ADD culture. Our culture is drunk on "new."

But then why does human misery persist? We eschew the traditional as restrictive. Yet the traditional is typically about reinforcing the value of commitment in the face of humanity's fascination and allure for the new. Seems that the consistent feature in all this is a fallen creature called Homo sapiens and his/her desperate desire for connection and community.

Sartre famusly said "Hell is other people." Really?

Traditional structures seem to be stabilize relationships and communities, supporting our being through the good and bad for a net happy life. But such thinking isn't new, so it must be bad... or at least not very exciting. After all, excitement, stimulus and pleasure seem to be the highest values in the land of the new. Ever wondered why?

It sells stuff.

Is "stuff" all there is? Yes, the materialists say. No, the metaphysicians (if there is such nomenclature) say. The materialist is wooed by the new thing, because things are all there is. It's all about how they relate to te self. The traditionalist follows the eternal, who he/she is called to be, bound by relationships to others.